The United States in the 1990s has had seven years of economic boom with low unemployment, low inflation, and low government deficit. Amid all of this good news, inequality has increased and wages have barely risen. Common sense knowledge seems to be right in this instance, that is, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the middle class is shrinking. Though President Clinton boasts that the number of people on welfare has decreased significantly under his regime to 8 million, a 44% decline from 1994, he forgets that there are still 36.5 million poor people in the United States, which is only a 2% decline in the same amount of time. How is it possible that we have increasing inequality during economic prosperity
This contradiction is not easily explained by the dominant neoclassical economic discourse of our time. Nor is it resolved by neoconservative social policy. More helpful is the one book under review: James K. Galbraith’s Created Unequal, a Keynesian a
A. being too optimistic about the economic prosperity
B. lying about the economic situation to the public
C. increasing the number of people on welfare
D. being reluctant to raise the salary of the average people
The economy of the United States after 1952 was the economy of a well-fed, almost fully employed people. Despite occasional alarms, the country escaped any postwar liquidation and lived in a state of boom. The history of extraction, production, and distribution had therefore been almost nothing but a statistical table reflecting prosperity. An economic survey of the year 1955, a typical year of the 1950’s, may be typical as illustrating the decade. The national output was valued at about 10 percent above that of 1954 (1955 output was estimated at 392 billion dollars). The production of manufacturers was about 40 percent more than it had averaged in the years immediately following World War Ⅱ. The country’s business spent about 30 billion dollars for new factories and machinery. National income available for spending was almost a third greater than it had been in 1950. Consumers spent about 256 billion dollars, that is, about 700 million dollars a day, or about twenty-
A. The agricultural trends of the 1950’s.
B. The unemployment rate in 1955.
C. The general economic situation in the 1950’s.
D. The federal budget of 1952.
| The United States has moved beyond the
industrial economy stage to the point where it has become the world’s first
service economy. Almost three-fourths of the nonfarm labor force is employed in
service industries, and over two-thirds of the nation’s gross national product
is accounted for by services. Also, service jobs typically hold up better during
a recession than do jobs in industries producing tangible goods. During the 20-year period of 1966 to 1986, about 36 million new jobs were created in the United States—far more than in Japan and Western Europe combined. About 90 percent of these jobs were in service industries. During this same time span, some 22 million women joined the labor force—and 97 percent of these women went to work in the service sector. These employment trends are expected to continue at least until the year 2010. For the pe A. (A) 32.4 million service jobs B. (B) 32.4 million jobs C. (C) 22 million service jobs D. (D) 19.8 million service jobs 我来回答: 提交
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